In noisy environments it becomes difficult to hear and/or concentrate on the sound transmitted over a telephone or speakerphone. This is a particularly, but not exclusively, relevant problem on trading floors in the financial industry. Trading floor environments present a hostile environment for acoustics. There are many reflective surfaces creating echo and reverberation, personnel are within close proximity to one another, each listening to different audio sources, and there is/are typically streaming video and/or TV audio playing in the background. At the same time, traders need to hear short quotes from bidders transmitted over their speakerphones. This causes traders to become fatigued and results in them having to ask the person on the far end of the communication channel to repeat the bid. In a world where seconds may equate to thousands and possibly millions of dollars, avoiding this type of fatigue becomes very relevant.
Support for end-to-end voice calls using Internet Protocol (“IP”) networks such as the Internet as an alternative to traditional public switched telephone networks (“PSTN”) is well known. VoIP is voice that is packetized as defined by IP, and communicated over the Internet for telephone-like communication. Individual VoIP packets may travel over different network paths to reach the final destination where the packets are reassembled in correct sequence to reconstruct the voice information.
While transmission over the Internet is inexpensive relative to transmission over the PSTN, the Internet poses problems which are not present in the PSTN. In particular, the transmission speed between any two users can change drastically due to the dynamic number of users sharing the common transmission medium, their bandwidth requirements, the capacity of the transmission medium, and the efficiency of the network routing and design. Other problems associated with VoIP are the variability of the quality of the signal received at the destination (i.e. the number of transmission errors such as packet loss, packet delay, corrupted packets, etc.). Thus, while the Internet may be a suitable medium for voice communications the suitability is not always consistent.
Many businesses employ customer premise switches (“CPS”)(e.g. Key Signaling Units (“KSU”), Private Branch Exchanges (“PBX”), Centrexes or the like) for routing calls, from, among other places, the business equipment to destination telephone equipment. Systems currently exist which monitor the quality of service (QoS) of an unreliable network (e.g. the Internet) to determine which communication path should be chosen to obtain the best QoS. However, these systems do not address the issues discussed above regarding a noisy environment.
It would thus be advantageous to create a system for use with a VoIP communications system which addresses issues related to listening in a noisy environment. It would be advantageous to create such a system that provides high quality voice and makes it easier for the human brain to discern the spoken words from the background noise.